Yeah, that's where I always get stuck too. The only way to excuse any of it at the end of the day is to go something like "well, that's how people really are, you know, not totally logical," and "life doesn't make sense," to which I usually point back to "Storyteller" and say, "uh, but you are telling a story, no matter how many jokes you make about it. what's your point?" You're still left, in the final analysis, with a number of characters who'd be booed off stage on Jerry Springer being upheld as heroic ideals, and sometimes I'm not so sure what I was meant to get out of that, shrug. I think that, more than anything else, tends to be the separating factor between fans of the series - it really does force you to pick a philosophical basis through which to view the characters, because the series itself refuses to do it for you.